Hasta La Gadget!

Don’t count Palm out just yet: the company announced that Elevation Partners has agreed to make an additional $100 million equity investment, which Palm is hoping will propel them beyond key product introductions in 2009, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The move immediately followed a report that Palm lost over $500 million during the second quarter, as more and more smartphone buyers chose models from RIM, Apple, HTC, and other makers ahead of the venerable handheld pioneer.

Most folks expect Palm to finally introduce its next-generation Palm OS, codenamed “Nova,” at CES in two weeks. But the company has yet to officially confirm that—despite teasing the tech press with a cryptic invitation. The company did confirm, however, that the Nova OS is already in the wild, at least with regard to the wireless carriers and various third-party developers.

Viliv got us salivating when it introduced the S5 MID and S7 UMPC back at IDF, and now we’ve got a few tasty updates on both. Starting with the former, we’ve learned via an interview with parent company Yukyung that the S5 MID will come packing a 1.33GHz Intel Atom CPU, 1GB of RAM, a 1.8-inch hard drive (1.3-inch when paired with a WiBro module in South Korea), a 4.8-inch 800 x 480 resolution touchscreen, integrated GPS / DMB and a primary battery good for up to six hours of use. The OS will be a home cooked system that’s fairly attractive, though the outfit has made clear that WinXP versions will be available in the future. Speaking of the future, the currently unpriced S5 is expected to ship in South Korea this coming January or February, while the S7 is still on track for release sometime after that.

[Via Slashgear]

Filed under: Handhelds

Viliv’s Atom-powered S5 MID gets detailed and pictured originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 23 Dec 2008 10:05:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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AMD, a company not exactly known for meeting its own deadlines, seemed to be trying to avoid news of painful delays for the Phenom II by simply not letting anyone say when the thing would be available. Now the chip is apparently in the hands of one lucky gamer at the HardOCP forums, Table21, who was kind enough to run it through its paces. The Phenom II 940 running at 3GHz scored a 4,091 on 3DMark06 and, once OC’d up to 3.85GHz, delivered a score of 5,086. It’s rather too early to draw any conclusions from these numbers, and we don’t know what he paid for the thing, but that performance does fall well behind Intel’s Core i7 Extreme that was similarly benchmarked last month, scoring 6,608 at the same clock speed. That’s quite a gap — but nothing a little liquid nitrogen won’t fix.

[Via PC Perspective]

Filed under: Desktops

AMD Phenom II processor bought, benchmarked, coveted originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 23 Dec 2008 09:40:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Textecution is a $10 application for Android phones which, as the name suggests, stops the user from sending text messages, specifically while they are driving.

It does it by tapping into the handset’s GPS. When the phone is detected as moving at 10mph or faster, the text function is executed.

Let us count the ways in which this sucks. One, a T-Mobile G1 (the only current Android phone) owner is likely to be of geekier stock than the average user and therefore entirely capable of removing Textecution. In fact, the FAQ confirms this:

Q:My parents installed this application on my phone. Can I uninstall it?
A: Yes.

Second, the app runs as a background process and, to work, will always be on, constantly accessing the GPS unit. The G1 has notoriously bad battery life already. This will kill it. The product pushes the safety angle thus:

Put your mind at ease knowing that your loved one, friend, employee or teenage driver is safer behind the wheel of the vehicle.

Indeed, but what is they do have an accident? With a dead cellphone battery, they can’t summon help.

Third, and possibly the most hilarious, is the answer to this question:

Is there a way to override the application once installed?

The answer is "yes", but ridiculously, you have send a request to the administrator, via, you guessed it, a text message.

If you wish to override and text while the car is in motion, let’s say you’re a passenger, choose "Request Permission", and a text message will be sent to the administrator who installed Textecution on your mobile device. [emphasis added]

Could a teenager pretend to be a passenger and lie to get their phone unlocked? Never!

Product page [Textecution via the Giz]

See Also:

• UK Woman Kills Grandmother While Texting at 70mph
• Governator Terminates Texting While Driving
• Drinking+Driving+Texting=Really Bad Idea

Editor’s note: From now through the end of December, various Crave experts will be sharing their top five (mostly) tech-related wishes for the holiday season. See what we crave, and maybe you’ll get some ideas!

I’ll be honest. What I want is Canon’s EF 500mm f/4L IS USM telephoto lens, but it costs $5,600, so let’s move on to some options that aren’t quite so detached from economic reality for a mostly amateur photographer such as myself.

Obviously my camera is a Canon SLR, but I’m reasonably happy with my setup right now, so here are some items I covet that are more modestly priced and that happen to be neutral as regards camera manufacturer.

RawWorkflow.com's WhiBal white-balance card

(Credit: RawWorkflow.com)

1. WhiBal white-balance card. I shoot raw images, which means data is taken directly from the camera’s image sensor without any in-camera processing. I like it because it gives me more flexibility for matters such as exposure adjustment. Second in importance to exposure, though, is fixing white balance–for example the orangey color cast you’ll often see when shooting under incandescent lights or the bluish tinge of pictures in the shade.

The flip side of raw photography is that it’s more manual labor than just grabbing the JPEG, but to me it’s worth it. I mostly just eyeball the white balance, but sometimes keying off parts of an image–the whites of someone’s eyes or gray and black clothing–gives an easier way to set white balance with software. But for more precision, the WhiBal cards from RawWorkflow.com give an easy way to be more rigorous. You take a photo of the durable card, which shows a standard 18 percent gray, then set the white balance in software off that part of the photo. With modern raw-image editing software, you can synchronize the white balance for a series of images off the one you took with the card. The $19 keychain model looks about my speed.
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